In November, the town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, unveiled a “Good Trouble” banner honoring the late congressman John Lewis. It depicted a graduate wearing a keffiyeh. The banner came down within a day, after Jewish residents objected. The sharper question is why no one thought to ask them first.
The keffiyeh is now everywhere, on campuses, at protests, and in media and politics, packaged as neutral, even celebratory. For many Jews, it is anything but.
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I walk through Washington and New York and see it on subways, in cafés, and at rallies. My reaction is immediate, visceral. For Jews whose families carry the memory of persecution, symbols are never abstract. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas slayed 1,200 Israelis, raped women and men, killed more than 100 residents of Kibbutz Be’eri in a single morning, and kidnapped Israelis and foreign nationals into Gaza, the keffiyeh has become, for many of us, inseparable from that violence.
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This shift is being deliberately ignored.
Historically, the keffiyeh was a practical garment worn across the Arab world by Iraqis, Jordanians, Bedouins, Syrians, Kurds, and Gulf Arabs. It belonged to no nation and carried no political charge. That changed in the mid-20th century, when PLO leader Yasser Arafat refashioned the black-and-white keffiyeh into a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. He draped it deliberately to mimic the shape of what he called “historic Palestine.”
On Nov. 13, 1974, Arafat wore it to the United Nations General Assembly and declared he came bearing “an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.” His movement and its affiliates went on to carry out the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1985 Achille Lauro ship hijacking and killing of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew who was shot and shoved overboard. Today, fighters from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad wear the keffiyeh. On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists wore it while they butchered families and paraded hostages into Gaza.
In the past decade, the symbol has gone global. It blankets encampments at Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, where chants such as “globalize the intifada” ring out. At CUNY, a Gaza solidarity encampment produced more than 170 arrests. The keffiyeh has become the uniform of protests, climate marches, and political rallies. The media elevates these voices without ever explaining what the symbol has come to mean, or what it does to the people staring back at it.
The defense is always the same. It is cultural. It is solidarity. It is resistance. But symbols are not defined by the wearer’s intent. They are defined by recognition, by use, by what they come to signify in the world.
There is precedent.
The swastika existed for thousands of years across Eurasia as a sign of good fortune. In the early 20th century, it appeared on products, badges, and even place names. None of that survived once the Nazis adopted it in 1920 and wore it while murdering 6 million Jews. After the Holocaust, the world accepted that its modern meaning had eclipsed its origins.
The parallel is not exact. The scale is not the same. But the mechanism is identical. A shared symbol is seized, reshaped, and broadcast through violence until its meaning is rewritten.
We are watching it happen again. Many insist the keffiyeh still means something benign. For many Jews, it signals the opposite, an alignment, witting or not, with movements that have justified, glorified, and carried out violence against us.
This is not a debate about fabric. It is a debate about whether the rest of the country is willing to admit when a symbol has stopped being neutral.
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Journalists do not hesitate to explain what a swastika or a Confederate flag means. The same intellectual honesty is owed here. Symbols either carry forward the meaning of how they are used, or they don’t. You cannot apply the rule selectively, only when Jews are not the ones being erased.
The people who feel the weight of these symbols are watching. They can tell the difference. And they are taking note of who pretends not to.
Yuval David is an Emmy Award-winning and multiple film festival-winning actor, filmmaker, and host, as well as a news commentator, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Jewish and LGBT advocate, focusing on U.S., Israeli, and Middle Eastern affairs.
